Identifying biases in special education (Papandrea et al., 2023)

<p><strong>Purpose:</strong> This study aimed to determine if eligibility for special education and related services (SERS) in New Jersey (NJ) is biased based on a child’s racial/cultural background or socioeconomic status (SES).</p> <p><strong>Method:</strong> A Qualtrics survey was administered to NJ child study team personnel including speech-language pathologists, school psychologists, learning disabilities teacher-consultants, and school social workers. Participants were presented with four hypothetical case studies, which differed only in racial/cultural background or SES. Participants were asked to make SERS eligibility recommendations about each case study.</p> <p><strong>Results: </strong>An aligned rank transform analysis of variance test found a significant effect of race on SERS eligibility decisions, <em>F</em>(2, 272) = 2.391, <em>p </em>= .093. Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests further yielded that Black children had significantly higher levels of SERS ineligibility at the high-SES (<em>z</em> = −2.648, <em>p </em>= .008) and mid-SES (<em>z </em>= −2.660, <em>p </em>= .008) levels compared to White children. When comparing SES levels within race using Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests, White low-SES children had significantly higher levels of ineligibility for SERS compared to White high-SES children (<em>z</em> = −2.008, <em>p </em>= .045). These results suggest that Black children from high/mid SES are treated comparably to White children from low SES; these groups are more likely to be found ineligible for SERS compared to peers.</p> <p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Both race and SES play a role in SERS eligibility decisions in NJ. Students who are Black and/or from low-SES households are at risk for facing significant biases in schools that influence their educational placements.</p> <p><strong>Supplemental Material S1. </strong>Survey. </p> <p><strong>Supplemental Material S2. </strong>Informed consent form. </p> <p>Papandrea, M. T., Namazi, M., Ghanim, I., & Patten, S. (2023). Identifying racial and socioeconomic biases in New Jersey special education eligibility. <em>Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 54</em>(2), 600–617. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_LSHSS-22-00138" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_LSHSS-22-00138</a></p>